Wow! I was thinking the same notes app like a month or two ago, even tried to create it! Can you open-source it? So we can contribute, and make it self hosted?
All code is embarrassing, and there will always be someone that comes along to ask "wow, why did you write THIS in this way? I wouldn't have done it that way!"
Would I ever be able to see the source, or run whatever backend the above request requires myself? Maybe I've answered my first question and this thing is 100% client side.
I've been using https://www.usememos.com/ as of late, so the concept resonates with me. It's the first note taking app I've went all in on that seems to make time a first-class feature. Yours takes that even further by breaking it down per entry.
this is the local-only version, everything is stored in a db in your browser.
the backend just serves the app and creates anonymous users. my private version of the app has cross-device sync,
it's just not ready yet for the public, because it relies on google/apple signup and storing the notes on a server, and I know it deters some privacy-minded folks.
Might be mild autism or some other mental condition, but I'm obsessive about timestamping everything. In my defense, it is useful when you want to refer back to it! Looks like a great little app
Timestamps are very underrated. There's so much useful information stored in them. It can help you remember what other things you did that day around that time, in what order some events happened, what were your initial plans and how they changed. These things can be so easily forgotten.
I agree; being able to export is super important for keeping records, and it's definitely my top request. Having a local app instead of a web app would be great too.
I have almost the same workflow with https://getdrafts.com/ where I only take short notes and I have custom action which sets the creation date+time of the note as its first line. But, having a separate entry for each line is the next level of this approach.
I really don't get how this can't be emulated with the F5 key, or something like Sublime Text's InsertDate package, or a text expansion software. What does this note taking provide that's any different?
Obsidian already has this, super-D for date, super-T for time, trivial to add inline as you go, if using a single-note approach. And any new note automatically captures its time of creation and last-edited time.
the approach here was to combine the simplicity of apple notes, working across devices, with the automatic time-stamping found in the desktop ecosystem of tools.
Obsidian/SublimeText users are probably not the target audience for this :)
I would love an option to easily export these, both in bulk and as individual notes. That way I can share them, feed them into software (i.e. AI to summarise) etc.
Maybe it's somewhere in the docs, but I can't find it easily in the mobile app
If you use org-mode, you can just set up a git repo which auto-commits with gitwatch. And run magit-blame when you want the timestamps. With the advantage that it doesn't distract you when you don't need to see them, but super useful when you want to check when a note is written.
Yeah, I do something similar with org-node (org-roam alternative) where every capture templates has an inactive timestamp at the end before the tags.
i.e. Idea: Build minesweeper in the terminal with Ratatui @ [2025-02-05 Wed 18:01] :@someday:
And then I capture it in a daily note (or very rarely refile it) that has an org-id. Then everything gets connected with links and backlinks.
I keep the usual CREATED in the properties drawer empty in case I want to turn that heading into a node for linking at some point.
Though I'm still figuring out some things about my approach as I go. One thing is clear, org-mode can be adapted to quite a lot of workflows regardless of their weirdness or efficacy.
Git gives you a full history of changes which is convenient for many other reasons. I also do sometimes put dated and less often timestamped entries when desired.
I'm just getting a blank page on Firefox and a few of these errors in the inspector output:
Uncaught SecurityError: Security error when calling GetDirectory
It does work on Chromium. And it looks nice. I wish it had keyboard navigation though, which it doesn't seem to have yet, so I can quickly correct a previous entry.
This is lovely. I maintain a dev log at work where I manually time-stamp entries section wise, but many times I’m doing it after the fact. Ability to edit the time stamps and then search based on it would make this super powered.
Actually, I would love to combine this with Heynote[0], have you considered it?
This is really sleek. I like the focus on minimalism since what I often need is a simple interface to take down quick notes, thoughts, and ideas. Any plans to offer a self-hosted version?
This is probably intentional -- if you want to fix a typo or make something clearer that you've already captured you likely want to preserve the original timestamp?
If you want an entry timestamped to your current time, you can make a new entry.
this is the answer :)
fixing errors should not alter the timeline
I assumed that editing timestamps is also quite problematic since it will break the chronological order of the note
This is a delightful app. Thank you for sharing! I like the user experience. I don't need to do anything except for write and press enter when I want to create a new line of text.
Whoa cool! I built a bespoke tool eerily similar to this several years ago as an intern at Johnson Space Center for logging mission communications. I’ve wished I had something like it for meeting notes every time since then. I’ll be giving it a try ;)
Looks awesome! Was thinking about building it for myself. One note: the delete function is not working apparently: it shows a note is deleted, but it appears again after reload.
Nit: clicking "Create X" to add a new tag seems worse than pressing enter to create one as you have to go off the tag menu and back onto it to create or add another, but it's not necessarily clear that you can press enter to create one.
I'm using a simple little combo of a shell script and alias to append a line of text to a text file in a known location. The script is just to prepend the line with a timestamp. Stupid and simple, but hey, it works for me.
My aliases:
alias ttag='/cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag.sh'
alias ttagcat='\cat /cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag-logfile.txt'
alias ttago='open /cygdrive/c/Dropbox/tools/ttag/ttag-logfile.txt'
I like the idea, but not the web-based implementation. Local first, and ideally an open source app that can work offline when I'm going distraction free.
It feels like a vim plugin. It definitely feels like org-mode can do this.
A few years back I had a little command line tool where I could log things quickly - it was like syslog for humans - but with #hashtags for projects or clients, and then a small tool that would work out how long I'd spent on different things. It required me to write a log every time I finished a task or a pomodoro. I might resurrect that, but having an open file has been cute for me for quite a while, and then I can go back and copy/paste what I need to draft docs and so on.
I do think "note taking" as an app is actually under-served. There's lots of wiki plugins, org-mode, tons of "productivity tools", but actually a single app that lets you just write, then helps you with review (and timestamps, contexts and so on are essential to that), and then figure out actions/todos and gives you seamless interaction with those, and integration with 3rd-party tools (I don't want to copy and paste between vim/emacs/JIRA/asana/notion/trello/apple notes/calendar reminders/outlook tasks/whatever), would be very, very neat.
Thanks for the hat-tip on `jrnl` - this is a much better version of the cmd line tool I talked about in my comment above and I am now starting to use it. Great logistics being cli-based, think I'm going to be using it plenty.
Being a developer, I'm aware that the desktop ecosystem offers a plethora of tools for this.
I think my main inspiration in this project was to combine the simplicity of apple notes with timestamped entries, being able to log notes in this form from any kind of device and having cross-device sync.
I released the local-only version so it will be useful to privacy-minded folks
but I do plan to have a cross-device backup and sync option since I believe it's a very compelling feature.
I have a command line tool that just takes a line of input, then writes the time stamped entry to a text file, one per quarter. A cron job pops up a terminal once an hour during business hours. I use that log to prepare for performance reviews to recall what I’d worked on, and I often go back to remember details about a problem I solved months or years ago. It’s fantastic, been using it for seven years.
In 2023, I wrote another script that appends a line to a csv file every 5 minutes. The line includes the focused window class, command line, title, name of the git branch that’s currently checked out, system idle time, and WiFi access point name. So I know pretty much how long I was working on everything vs other stuff like slack.
I’m finally starting to write tools to visualize and analyze this data. Is it going to change how I work? Not really, but for some reason I like seeing at a glance how I spent my time.
136 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadI noticed there was no simple way to achieve this with any note taking app, so I made one.
* every line you write is automatically timestamped.
* minimalist and distraction free - follows the simplicity of the built-in note apps.
* cross platform - it's a webapp so no install required, works great on mobile, web, android, iOS, tablets.
you can use it for free, no email and no signup required.
I made this first version where data is stored locally on your device.
Sharing here in case someone finds it useful, it would be great to know I solved the same problem for anyone else :)
I went ahead and created the app with Claude 3.7, backend is in Go, frontend is in React. Sqlite is used for storage.
There is also a docker-compose file.
Anyone can contribute
Would I ever be able to see the source, or run whatever backend the above request requires myself? Maybe I've answered my first question and this thing is 100% client side.
I've been using https://www.usememos.com/ as of late, so the concept resonates with me. It's the first note taking app I've went all in on that seems to make time a first-class feature. Yours takes that even further by breaking it down per entry.
I'll consider the self hosted route.
I have almost the same workflow with https://getdrafts.com/ where I only take short notes and I have custom action which sets the creation date+time of the note as its first line. But, having a separate entry for each line is the next level of this approach.
Obsidian/SublimeText users are probably not the target audience for this :)
Maybe it's somewhere in the docs, but I can't find it easily in the mobile app
i.e. Idea: Build minesweeper in the terminal with Ratatui @ [2025-02-05 Wed 18:01] :@someday:
And then I capture it in a daily note (or very rarely refile it) that has an org-id. Then everything gets connected with links and backlinks.
I keep the usual CREATED in the properties drawer empty in case I want to turn that heading into a node for linking at some point.
Though I'm still figuring out some things about my approach as I go. One thing is clear, org-mode can be adapted to quite a lot of workflows regardless of their weirdness or efficacy.
https://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html
Actually, I would love to combine this with Heynote[0], have you considered it?
[0]: https://heynote.com/
If you want an entry timestamped to your current time, you can make a new entry.
Nit: clicking "Create X" to add a new tag seems worse than pressing enter to create one as you have to go off the tag menu and back onto it to create or add another, but it's not necessarily clear that you can press enter to create one.
how do you think we can make it more obvious?
I'm using a simple little combo of a shell script and alias to append a line of text to a text file in a known location. The script is just to prepend the line with a timestamp. Stupid and simple, but hey, it works for me.
My aliases:
The shellscript:Btw, F5 in Notepad inserts a time stamp.
It feels like a vim plugin. It definitely feels like org-mode can do this.
A few years back I had a little command line tool where I could log things quickly - it was like syslog for humans - but with #hashtags for projects or clients, and then a small tool that would work out how long I'd spent on different things. It required me to write a log every time I finished a task or a pomodoro. I might resurrect that, but having an open file has been cute for me for quite a while, and then I can go back and copy/paste what I need to draft docs and so on.
I do think "note taking" as an app is actually under-served. There's lots of wiki plugins, org-mode, tons of "productivity tools", but actually a single app that lets you just write, then helps you with review (and timestamps, contexts and so on are essential to that), and then figure out actions/todos and gives you seamless interaction with those, and integration with 3rd-party tools (I don't want to copy and paste between vim/emacs/JIRA/asana/notion/trello/apple notes/calendar reminders/outlook tasks/whatever), would be very, very neat.
Agree!
[1] https://github.com/zim-desktop-wiki/zim-desktop-wiki/issues/...
echo "$(date) Do something" | tee -a notes
Being a developer, I'm aware that the desktop ecosystem offers a plethora of tools for this.
I think my main inspiration in this project was to combine the simplicity of apple notes with timestamped entries, being able to log notes in this form from any kind of device and having cross-device sync.
I released the local-only version so it will be useful to privacy-minded folks but I do plan to have a cross-device backup and sync option since I believe it's a very compelling feature.
In 2023, I wrote another script that appends a line to a csv file every 5 minutes. The line includes the focused window class, command line, title, name of the git branch that’s currently checked out, system idle time, and WiFi access point name. So I know pretty much how long I was working on everything vs other stuff like slack.
I’m finally starting to write tools to visualize and analyze this data. Is it going to change how I work? Not really, but for some reason I like seeing at a glance how I spent my time.